One of the problems with using summary for a preview is that some platforms, like Hubzilla, strip out all of the HTML. And by doing that, is it really a preview anymore?

@julian By the way, I was not criticizing you personally. The entire ActivityPub situation is messed up where we have to do things that make no sense so they are compatible with certain systems.

And if putting the whole post in summary was not intended, then there is a bug, because we are receiving the body of the post as both the summary and the body fields.

A URL would be better, but in the case of a blog post, most people would expect it to deliver them to the original blog post. What WordPress would call a permalink.

Depends on what is being stripped. Does it completely remove all HTML content, including text paragraphs, or just sanitizes it?

ActivityStreams vocabulary defines summary as "A natural language summarization of the object encoded as HTML":

Activity Vocabulary

(www.w3.org)

I think that means images and other media shouldn't appear in summary, because they are not natural language.

There is a subtle distinction between using a URL that serves as a unique identifier and a URL that directs you to the source rendered as a web page.

When I said link, I was referring to something that resolves to a web page, typically showing the blog post or forum thread or social media post. Something you can put in the UI that users click on.

As far as I can tell as a user, Hubzilla currently treats summary as plain text.

And I don't think Hubzilla expected HTML, since we currently have this weird situation where it converts all incoming text to BBCode, but then does not parse the BBCode for the summary field. HTML in the summary appears to be an unexpected use case for Hubzilla.

I am not sure what Mario Vati (the head developer) plans to do about the situation. I saw a post where he was trying to get clarification of why we are receiving HTML in the summary from some platforms.

This is what we receive in the summary field and how it is displayed. You have to click on "View Article" to see the formatted version.

Can you point me to where Mario is asking for feedback?

That rendering of the NodeBB post looks like a flat out bug. NodeBB is sending HTML which looks like is being converted to bbcode, which is likely an internal mechanism but leaked out accidentally.